


Love (As They Say)

by misscam



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-04
Updated: 2008-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 12:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misscam/pseuds/misscam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She is after all Laura Roslin, teacher even as President, and somewhere alongside her, he's learned life by fiat. Love by fiat.</i> [Adama/Roslin]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love (As They Say)

**Author's Note:**

> Set after "Sine Qua Non" and contains spoilers for that. Speculation from there on, no explicit spoilers. Show will probably make it AU. For falena84, who requested a particular kink. Many thanks to lyricalviolet for beta.

Love (As They Say)  
by **misscam**

Disclaimer: Not my characters, just my words.

II

All the waiting in space, and all Bills seems to be getting from it is Laura's disappointment.

It isn't a fiercely glaring version of it, because he has been on opposite sides of that too and knows the feeling. It's something more tired, something almost sad, and Laura has been radiating it the whole five minutes he's been explaining why he's here and the Fleet is not.

Laura is disappointed, but she hasn't let go of his hand. Not since he took it and lead her into his raptor, the closest enclosed space for privacy he could think of on this frakking basestar, and had Helo watch outside. She hasn't let go, and she even caresses his skin with her thumb now and then, as if to reassure herself he's really there.

So he tells her, matter-of-factly, of Zarek and Lee and the search for her, his own increasingly lost objectivity, Romo's words and his choice and even the why he gave Lee. She closes her eyes for a moment at that, looking almost pained.

It isn't that she doesn't return his feelings, he knows. Her words from the moment of their reunion still echo in his head, and he knows whatever else, that she does love him.

"I finished the book while I waited," he says, and she smiles for the briefest moment at that. One day, he might tell her all the things he thought during the wait, all the impossible futures he envisioned and all the possible fears he faced.

"Bill," she says, then exhales for a moment and watches their hands, entwined. "Bill, I'm dying. I know I'll die. Don't you understand? It has to be you that leads after. You can't... You have to live without me."

"Laura," he cuts in, a bit surprised to hear anger in his own voice. "You don't decide that."

"I need it," she says fiercely, leaning forward. "I never wanted the diloxin. I took it for you, for the Fleet, for getting us to Earth and you think I did any of it so it could frakking fall apart the moment I am gone?"

"Nothing's falling apart," he counters. "Lee and Saul will..."

" _Lee_ and _Saul_ ," she repeats, taking her glasses off with her free hand, and rubbing the top of her nose with a knuckle for a moment. "Bill, I was there for the last time. I was in the brig, but I was there."

"Don't blame that on Saul. Blame that on me."

"I don't blame you," she says softly, her smile a little distant. "But I still think you can be an idiot."

He laughs, she finally relaxes a bit and he can see Cottle was right. She looks better, probably feels better, and her skin feels softer off the diloxin. He's tried to be there for her, help her carry the strain of the treatments, but he wonders for a brief moment if he really has any idea what she's enduring.

The again, she has no idea what he is. It seems too late to live without her when she is life, and has been from the moment she convinced him to run from the Cylons, not die fighting them. She is after all Laura Roslin, teacher even as President, and somewhere alongside her, he's learned life by fiat.

Love by fiat too, he thinks, and yet not.

"Makes two of us," he suggests, because it does. "You know, we're surrounded by Cylons. We could still get you a new body. But no blonde."

He closes his eyes to her laugh, because the sound of it is delight enough and seem to echo with his heartbeats.

"I think this body will do a while yet," she says, and with his eyes still closed, she kisses him.

He leans back in the seat as she does, listening to the faint sounds of the raptor and her breathing, feeling her lips press against his with the same determination she does anything else. Make a decision, follow it through, no apologies and no begged forgiveness, that's always been her. He hasn't always agreed with her, but this time, he's willing to take a lead.

Particularly when she climbs over and straddles him, and he opens his eyes to see her face inches from his, the look on hers like a blazing sun.

"Bill," she says, his name a command and caress both. "You _will_ live."

He doesn't get the chance to argue, because she kisses him again, parting his lips to let her tongue trace the line of his teeth. She doesn't taste of medicines and sick bay, all the things he's grown to hate but endure, and it's enough to feed the illusion that there is no sickness, nothing that has a stronger claim on her than him.

Her knees press a little into his hips as she moves, and the weight of her across his thighs is a comfortable warmth. It almost feels a little like youth again, when he was Husker and frakking in a plane wasn't that strange a possibility.

He never quite imagined the Admiral would get where the flyboy didn't, and especially not with the President of the Twelve Colonies - because it's pretty clear that's what Laura has in mind as she lowers a hand and the touching is burning even through layers of cloth.

Right. Or wrong time, wrong place, wrong person outside (frak, Helo's probably still there and he can't explain they've just been 'debriefing' with a serious face) as it really is, but he's just waited in space with nothing but hope for company only to get her back, and it is her and him and life, and...

"Frak," he mumbles, and Laura laughs into the kiss, almost triumphantly.

Frak. Right.

A raptor has limited space, and they bump into surfaces more than once while clothes get removed, and each time he wonders if he's too old for this. But he knows he's not when Laura lowers herself on his jacket, smiling all the while as he goes down with her.

He is more careful than she might have liked, he senses, pushing impatiently against him and gripping his shoulders hard enough to leave marks from her fingernails. But she still lets him set the pace, lets him linger while kissing her collarbone, lets him get used to the weight of her breast in his hand, lets him watch each inch of her as if he is burning it into memory. All of it.

He is. Laura's left knee has a scar, and he memorizes the feel of it against his thumb. He will remember. Her right earlobe is more sensitive than her left. He will remember. She likes to tug at his bottom lip. She makes a noise at the back of her throat that isn't a moan and not a sigh, and he thinks he could hear it a thousand times and still not classify it. Her cheeks flushed feel comfortably warm against his palm. Her skin tastes faintly of salt when she perspires. She inhales when he trusts, exhales when he pulls back. She never looks away, just closes her eyes sometimes and smiles when she opens them. Her spine arches when she lets go. The look on her face when she comes he doesn't even have categorize to know he'll always have with him.

He will remember.

She puts her head on his shoulder for a moment, breath still ragged and almost in sync with his own. He watches her as she calms it, but she doesn't quite look at him.

"We have a lot to sort out," she says after a while, taking his hand again. "The Fleet, the Final Five, Lee..."

"Helo," he injects, and Laura makes a beautiful face. "I don't know what he thinks we're doing in here."

"You waited for me," she says, and her voice holds wonder now too. "All alone, everyone else assuming I was dead. I think Helo has his ideas about we're doing and feeling."

They all will have now, she doesn't say, and he wonders how she feels about that.

"Yes," he simply agrees, and kisses her hand in his. "I waited for you."

Don't be in such a hurry to die, he doesn't say. Fall apart without her, fall together with her. He's made the choice once. He can't promise her he won't repeat it.

"I never asked you too," she says firmly. "I would have told you to stay with the Fleet. It's too important. But..."

She looks at him, and something on her face seems to fall a little, just for a moment. "If it had been you..."

He kisses her hard, and she returns it with force, and he can feel anger in her. Little at him, little at herself, and probably a whole lot at the Universe. At least, that's what his anger is. Love is never even, never fair and frequently painful, and often occurring unasked for. And yet... He wouldn't change it. Wouldn't live without it.

"We're going to find Earth," he tells her, because she told him once and he believes in her even when she doesn't. "Together."

Without which not, he thinks, as she leans against him, and he can't even tell their heartbeats apart anymore, as if the one needs the other to be heard. He could live on without her. It just that it wouldn't be life, a mere passage of time until there was none left.

There is no Earth without Laura. There's just another planet in space. Some things need more than just existence to be.

Sine qua non, as they say.

II

FIN


End file.
